Tag: scott-heim • BookLikes

review SPOILER ALERT! 2014-11-16 00:00

We Disappear: A Novel (P.S.) - Scott Heim

This books can have any rating, from 1 to 5 stars, and all of them would be probably right WRONG.

What to say about a book, that is so ingeniously written but that you CAN'T recommend to NOBODY?

How to review a book that belongs probably to one of the best written books I've read with a plot that I don't want to read EVER again, with the characters that I can only hope not to come across very often, with the worst ANTI-HERO as a narrator?

The story? You mean this fucking depressing disturbing hopeless stuff?

On your own risk.

After the phone call from his mother a heavily crystal meth addicted freelancer Scott comes from New York,where he works two days per week at Pen & Ink and 5 days per week is busy with getting high, to Partridge, his hometown in Kansas. To find out that the real reason for this call was not actually the new facts in her research in cases of disappearing children -a hobby that has become his mother's obsession and which she's devoted herself entirely to- but because her health condition has been deteriorating increasingly. His mother is dying of cancer and has hardly more than some weeks left to live. And she has some secrets to reveal...

This story is so fucking depressing, disturbing and deeply pessimistic!

A heavy stuff.

And nevertheless, in all its depressing aspects, we have a very poetic, photographically vivid and lyrical novella. Believe me or not.

I hated it and at the same time I admired it.
I couldn't put it down, it pulled me in, I wanted this fucking solution at the end of the story!
Did this kidnapping in the past really happen? Was it a reason for her obsession years later? Which of her versions of the story was true? Or was it only the cancer that went to her brain?

And then the ending...

Was the mystery so important here at all?
Or maybe it was only about a touching mother-son relationship?
About the last attempt of the mutter to save her son from his drug addiction?

Honestly. I don't know.

But doesn't matter how I'll rate it-
5 Stars for the brilliant eloquent GREAT writing.

I bow to this writing.

P.S. There are so many fabulous poignant reviews for this book, you should read them to decide if it's for you or not.

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review 2014-03-06 21:23

Mysterious Skin

My Reading Antlers

"When I sprinted from the house, I saw the moon, orange, almost electric, stalled between feathery clouds like a helium balloon, ready to burst into a million splinters. Without glasses, the world melted from focus. The house and trees seemed under water. I leaned against a tree and felt its knobby trunk pressing into my skin like a column of bones."

Rating: 5 Stars
Genre: Contemporary Fiction, LGBTQ
Setting: U.S - Midwest
Timeline: 1980's
Official Summary: At the age of eight Brian Lackey is found bleeding under the crawl space of his house, having endured something so traumatic that he cannot remember an entire five–hour period of time. During the following years he slowly recalls details from that night, but these fragments are not enough to explain what happened to him, and he begins to believe that he may have been the victim of an alien encounter. Neil McCormick is fully aware of the events from that summer of 1981. Wise beyond his years, curious about his developing sexuality, Neil found what he perceived to be love and guidance from his baseball coach. Now, ten years later, he is a teenage hustler, a terrorist of sorts, unaware of the dangerous path his life is taking. His recklessness is governed by idealized memories of his coach, memories that unexpectedly change when Brian comes to Neil for help and, ultimately, the truth.

Two words. Soul crushing, just absolutely soul crushing. Life is tragic, it is beautiful and redemptive, yet it was hard to go through the book with any sort of optimism. Once the milk has been spilled, the stain just won't come out. Things are built up, and they fall to pieces. The characters try their best to pull the pieces back together, but in the end, one just has to keep pushing along, surviving and trying to find some joy in the fact that at least they are loved and not completely alone.

The prose is beautiful, sparse and to the point yet poetic. The characters themselves are relatable. The story features various points of views all from the different characters as they grow up in Little River or Hutchinson Kansas, but mainly focuses on the lives of Brian Lackey and Neil McCormick, both of who had suffered terrible trauma during childhood and how they deal with and then eventually come to terms with what had happened to them.

Mysterious Skin is probably better known for its movie starring Joseph Gordon Levitt. I have seen the movie, but I don't think I will discuss the differences between the two, they both have their merits. I think, perhaps, the movie is less disturbing just because the scenes in the book are just that much more graphic (whereas they would not actually show the abuse explicitly in the movie). I would not recommend this book to those who are easily offended by sex and violence involving children and teens. However, the book is honest, and these things DO happen and I believe that it is worth reading and acknowledging, even if it is so very painful and heartbreaking.

To play devil's advocate about the cons of the book, at some point, I felt like the minor POVs (Wendy and Eric) served no purpose than to show how awesomely hot and dangerous Neil was. "As I later wrote in my journal, Neil would have 'averted my eye from an uncapped grenade'". Now imagine this... almost all the time. At some point, I felt that all the other characters besides Neil and Brian sort of existed for the sole purpose of illustrating a more objective view of them. That's not to say that the minor characters aren't painted vividly, because they are, but they didn't seem particularly important and could've really been replaced by anyone and it wouldn't have made much of a difference. It was also a bit more than suited my tastes with the self-wallowing.

All of the characters are looking to escape. You can be Deborah or her father who literally moves away, or like Wendy and Eric who fantasizes about being saved from monotony with their morbid fantasies of murder and mayhem, or you can be Neil, who separates himself from others by lashing out on them, or like Brian, who, instead of facing the troubles in front of him, prefers to look towards the sky for glimpses of the extraterrestrial. Mysterious Skin is a book about a small suburb in the middle of nowhere and how all the characters feel trapped. It is a story about growing up, and how rarely one ever does it gracefully, but with a sort of violence that leaves one with a sense of vertigo.

The protection of innocence and its theft is what some people would consider the transitional point between child and adult. You are no longer a child if you are corrupted, yet, that is hardly the case since no one in the story gives off the feeling of being a responsible adults. The adults in the story struggle to raise their children while their own personal lives come crashing down like a vase into a thousand tiny pieces. They are child molesters, rapists, lonely men who slowly drive by parks looking for prostitutes are examples of those on the more degenerate side, and at best, they are too busy wrestling with their own problems to do anything about the problems of others. And if they are not blind to the problems of their children, they can do little about it except watch them grow up as one would an inevitable train crash. Brian's mother is as close to a responsible adult as one gets in the story, bless her soul.

Needless to say, it is a depressing story. Prepare to suffer.

Anyway, enough of about the book. I went and googled "pedophilia" (hope the cops don't bust through my door and arrest me, I swear it's just for this review), but I came across some interesting discoveries that I'm sure everyone else already knew and I'm the only one who is late to the party.

According to WebMD, a pedophile is: "a person who has a sustained sexual orientation toward children, generally aged 13 or younger. Not all pedophiles are child molesters (or vice versa). Child molesters are defined by their acts; pedophiles are defined by their desires. Some pedophiles refrain from sexually approaching any child for their entire lives." But it's not clear how common that is.

Pedophilia has been categorized as a mental disorder since 1968. I find it sort of odd that they would say it is both a mental disease and a sexual orientation. I'm not trying to defend pedophilia or anything, but not that long ago, homosexuality was considered a disease as well... hm, some food for thought. I'm definitely not venturing into that territory since that opens up a whole can of worms and I don't want to be caught with my foot in my mouth. At the moment, I kind of view pedophilia as a mental disease a bit like an antisocial personality disorder. It's not something that one can help, and it is detrimental to others living in society. There is no cure, but there is therapy that makes it manageable.

So all of this talk about traumatized children, destroyed childhoods, and sexual predators begs the question of how early is too early to talk about sex with your children. Personally, I think it is never too early to talk about sex. If a child can ask about it, then a parent/guardian should be able to answer it. Knowing too much is definitely better than knowing too little. There are concerns by parents that by teaching their children about sex, they will immediately start bopping like bunnies. Well, sure, generally that happens when sex is FIRST taught to children by the media and pornography (think Neil McCormick whose first exposure to sex is porno mags and watching his mother and her boyfriend), which does nothing but glamorize sex while ignoring all the responsibilities and precautions that are necessary when it comes to connecting so intimately with another human being. In pornography, vulnerability is an act, and a fantasy that doesn't actually exist. All porn stars look pretty damn confident in themselves as well as movie actors/actresses who are having sex for the first time (pan slowly away to the full moon out the window as the bodies fall slowly to the bed).

That's why I believe it is important to teach your child about sex before something or someone else does. I for one, would not want my child to one day be caught by a predator and not know what's going on or that what is happening to him or her is wrong and help should be sought for immediately, or even if it could not be helped, that the child should feel safe enough with talking about what happens in the lower half of a human body to a parental figure without feeling ashamed or dirty. After all, we want to catch that fucker and many of these crimes are not reported until it is much too late.

Wow, I really went off on a moralizing tangent didn't I? Well all in all, I think Mysterious Skin is a fabulous book, but will definitely strike the wrong chords with some people. Read at your own risk.

Source: readingantlers.blogspot.com/2014/03/review-mysterious-skin-by-scott-heim.html

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review 2013-03-15 00:00

Mysterious Skin

Reading Old Books and Other Extreme Sports

Cinematic writing, great characterisation, quietly horrifying and viscerally uncomfortable. Reading this felt like tasting blood.

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review 2011-12-23 00:00

Barrita

Lo mejor del libro es la atmósfera de misterio y la descripción precisa que permite imaginar bien un lugar desconocido. He oído muchas cosas positivas sobre la forma de escribir de Scott Heim, y entiendo porque. Ojala la historia en si estuviera a la par.

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review 2008-10-05 00:00

willemite

This is a very sharp-edged multiple coming of age novel. No Tom Sawyers here. Brian Lackey (and can’t you tell what sort of person he is by his name?) wakes up in the crawlspace under his home one midnight when he is 8 years old, bloody, with no knowledge of what had happened to the last five hours. Neil McCormick, afflicted with a floozy of a mother, finds a Playgirl under her bed one day, and realizes that it speaks directly to his undefined yearnings. He goes on to commit some terrible crimes under the influence of the evil Coach. Wendy Peterson has a crush on Neil and will follow him anywhere, which is definitely not a good thing. Brian’s older sister, Deborah gets a voice late in the book as well. Eric Preston is attracted to the adolescent Neil and becomes involved with him. There is plenty of darkness to go around in Kansas of the 80s and early 90s, drunken abusive fathers, loose women, child molesters, adolescent hustlers and their clients, unspeakable cruelty to the helpless, and even a UFO. It made me uncomfortable at times reading this. I stuck it out because the diversity of views made the story-telling interesting. Heim has skill to go along with what must be a closet full of personal demons. This book was a bit overloaded with the horned creatures, but the skill still shone through. Events here occur on Halloween, although Heim stretches to include it, as the primary event occurs during the summer. It seems an afterthought that he creates a second event on Halloween for Brian. It seems as if he is trying to force his events into a structure regardless of how such stuffing affects the logic of the narrative.

There is some compelling referential imagery, as in when Brian is attempting to recover his lost time as a late teenager and is watching a scene from the Exorcist in which Regan’s stomach displays the words “Help me.” Second hand it may be, and perhaps a bit forced, but I thought it was ok here.

There is a seminal (yes, intended) scene late in which Neil is hustling in New York and is taken by an abusive john, raped and thrown away. It is meant to evince the damage done by Neil and Coach to the young boys they used, including Brian. Neil undergoes his change. Not all the characters grow here. Brian does, Neil does.

This was an engaging, if uncomfortable read. While the subject matter was harsh, the author’s talent shines through.